‘Authentic’ Italian eatery stretches into south-end Barrie

Mozzarella lovers have new reason to celebrate as Scaddabush opens its doors at Park Place, bringing authentic taste of Italy with social twist

A new eatery has recently opened in south-end Barrie, much to the delight of pasta and cheese lovers.

Scaddabush Italian Kitchen and Bar has swung open its doors at 129 Park Place Dr., offering pasta dishes and their signature fresh mozzarella which is hand-stretched to order in-house, using traditional Italian methods for “exceptional texture and flavour.”

“The community in Barrie has been very welcoming, and we couldn’t be happier to be a part of it,” senior director of operations Derek Habraken told BarrieToday, an affiliate of BradfordToday and InnisfilToday.

The restaurant, which has now been open for the past month, enjoyed a full house on Thursday evening when this BarrieToday reporter dropped in.

“A lot of our tables, you’ll notice, are long and social. We call it our kitchen table, where it’s a group together — and they may not be your group — so we try to support seating people who are strangers, and hopefully by the end of the experience, there’s a friendship that develops,” Habraken said.

The restaurant does what they call “kitchen table” sampling.

“We’ll come up with a big bowl of pasta, and we’ll just, you know, no charge, we’ll start passing plates around, and you would pass to a stranger and pass back and forth, and there’s something about sharing food,” he said.
”I don’t care where you’re from or what you do. You share food and it’s something intimate, and it breaks down barriers and it breaks down the walls.”

Everything about the business is Italian inspired.

“We are authentic,” Habraken said. “We North Americanize some dishes, but we are traditionally authentic Italian in the way in which we prepare it.”

At Scaddabush, they make their own pasta from scratch.

“It’s not brought in the back door and thawed and put on a plate,” Habraken said. “We hang it in-house.

“We make our own bread in-house. We make our own sauces in-house. Essentially, anything that we can do in-house that we feel really strongly and confident about, we do,” he added.

That being said, mozzarella is their specialty.

“We hand-make every mozzarella,” he said.

The chefs take the virgin curd and run it under hot water at 185 degrees Celsius — to break down the proteins and make it malleable.

“(We) stretch it out and form it until you sort of see this beautiful satiny, silky glow to it. It’s almost a sheen,” Habraken explained.

The mozzarella then gets submersed in ice water for 30 seconds to hold its form and then it goes to the plate to be served.

“This is made to order,” he said. “This isn’t pre-made and set up later.
Every mozzarella is made to order, and you can actually watch it being made in our open kitchen.”

In that kitchen, which is a hive of activity with dishes and utensils clinking and banging away, is Alejandro Herrera, who is stretching and forming a ball of mozzarella over a bowl of ice water — one of just hundreds which are made each day by the chefs.

“I like working in the kitchen,” he told BarrieToday. “I love the rush and the excitement that comes from it, and making the mozzarella balls, as it’s a kind of art.”

Herrera says this open-kitchen style and the handmade mozzarella is a different way of doing things.

“You don’t really see it anywhere else,” he said. “It’s kind of unique. It really makes the restaurant stand out.”

Scaddabush Italian Kitchen and Bar at Park Place in Barrie. | Kevin Lamb/BarrieToday